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Welcome to the VFAT-OS2 home page ! (Last updated on 24.05.00)
What is VFAT-OS2 ?
VFAT-OS2 is a package that will allow OS/2 to seamlessly access
Windows 95 VFAT formatted partitions from OS/2 as if they were standard OS/2 drive
letters.
The ultimate aim of this package is to be able to use the VFAT file system as a
replacement of FAT.
VFAT-OS2 is based upon the Linux VFAT 2.0.33 and the EXT2_240 package
from M. Willm.
VFAT-OS2 is composed of several parts :
 | A 32 bits OS/2 file system driver that allows read-write access to Windows 95 VFAT file
systems. |
| A 32 bits OS/2 file system driver that allows read-only access to Windows NT NTFS file
systems. |
| utilities to mount and unmount drive. |
What will be the main features of the file system driver ?
The file system driver,
vfat-os2.ifs, is the heart of VFAT-OS2, as it is the component that manages seamless
access to Windows 95 VFAT and Windows NT NTFS file systems.
This driver has the following
characteristics :
| it is a full 32 bits ring 0 implementation, |
| it supports read/write access (readonly for NTFS) |
| it has a global pseudo-dynamic disk cache, only limited by physical memory available, |
| it takes advantage of the underlying I/O subsystem by using its asynchronous I/O
interface. |
What is the latest version of VFAT-OS2 ?
The latest available version of VFAT-OS2 is 0.05,
it was released on December 4th., 1998 in a package file named vfat_005.zip (278856
bytes).
Source code of VFAT-OS2 v0.04 can be found
here. This source must be installed
on top of EXT2_240
It is still beta code!
VFAT-OS2 v0.05
has the following features:
| based on Linux 2.0.33 vfat sources |
| case-insensitive file names except for renaming files |
| disk summary is now correct |
| floppy disk support |
| umount and remount do not requires EMX dlls |
| supports volume label |
| changing from FAT to VFAT filesystem type at runtime
(remount command) |
| corrected a memory leak problem in the IFS |
| early R/O support for NTFS file system |
Attention
If you had problems with VFAT-OS2 v0.04 resulting in trap 0e screen relating to kernel
stack overflow you won't profit from v0.05 as these problems are still there. But if you
got a trap some minutes or hour later you may profit from v0.05 as a memory leak problem
has been detected and corrected.
NTFS support
To enable the early readonly support for NTFS add the option "-NTFS" to the
command line for VFAT-OS2.IFS.
Where to find VFAT-OS2 ? VFAT-OS2 can be found at least on the following sites :
Some links to vfat related pages
Know problems and restrictions
| extended attributes (EAs) are not supported |
| booting from VFAT partition not supported |
| renaming filenames are currently still casesensitive (eg. ren test.c Test.c
fails) |
| all files on a VFAT partition are displayed with the command "dir" |
| currently VFAT still have some problems with support for floppy disk (A:, B:) on some
OS/2 version |
| currently swapping to VFAT partition not supported (SWAPPATH statement in CONFIG.SYS) |
| MBCS/DBCS are not supported |
| non ASCII character (>128) are not correctly translated |
| VFAT-OS2 is not compatible to DISKCACHE statement. Do not specify a VFAT partition in
the DISKCACHE statement |
early NTFS support
| only readonly mode supported |
| slow performance |
| disk summary are not displayed correctly |
| file date is not correct |
Feedback and support Please feel free to contact me for any question on vfat-os2. You are
also encouraged to give me some feedback on how it works on your system and what new
features you would like ... this helps me improve it ! Both success stories and disasters
interest me.
Info
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